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Jan 8, 2016

Too Little, Too Late

Last week, after a great deal of debate, the passengers
aboard the Titanic voted to impose modest limits sometime soon on the
rate at which water is pouring into the doomed ship’s hull. Despite the
torrents of self-congratulatory rhetoric currently flooding into the media from
the White House and an assortment of groups on the domesticated end of the
environmental movement, that’s the sum of what happened at the COP-21
conference in Paris. It’s a spectacle worth observing, and not only for those
of us who are connoisseurs of irony; the factors that drove COP-21 to the
latest round of nonsolutions are among the most potent forces shoving
industrial civilization on its one-way trip to history’s compost bin.

The core issues up for debate at the Paris meeting were the
same that have been rehashed endlessly at previous climate conferences. The
consequences of continuing to treat the atmosphere as a gaseous sewer for
humanity’s pollutants are becoming increasingly hard to ignore, but nearly everything
that defines a modern industrial economy as “modern” and “industrial” produces
greenhouse gases, and the continued growth of the world’s modern industrial
economies remains the keystone of economic policy around the world. The goal
pursued by negotiators at this and previous climate conferences, then, is to
find some way to do something about anthropogenic global warming that won’t
place any kind of restrictions on economic growth.

What that means in practice is that the world’s nations have
more or less committed themselves to limit the rate at which the dumping of
greenhouse gases will increase over the next fifteen years. I’d encourage those
of my readers who think anything important was accomplished at the Paris
conference to read that sentence again, and think about what it implies. The
agreement that came out of COP-21 doesn’t commit anybody to stop dumping carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, now or at any point in
the future. It doesn’t even commit anybody to set a fixed annual output that
will not be exceeded. It simply commits the world’s nations to slow down the
rate at which they’re increasing their dumping of greenhouse gases. If this
doesn’t sound to you like a recipe for saving the world, let’s just say you’re
not alone.

It wasn’t exactly encouraging that the immediate aftermath
of the COP-21 agreement was a feeding frenzy among those industries most likely
to profit from modest cuts in greenhouse gas consumption—yes, those would be
the renewable-energy and nuclear industries, with some efforts to get scraps
from the table by proponents of “clean coal,” geoengineering, fusion-power
research, and a few other subsidy dumpsters of the same sort. Naomi Oreskes, a
writer for whom I used to have a certain degree of respect, published a
crassly manipulative screed insisting that anybody who questioned the
claim that renewable-energy technologies could keep industrial society powered
forever was engaged in, ahem, “a new form of climate denialism.” She was more
than matched, to be fair, by a chorus of meretricious shills for the nuclear
industry, who were just as quick to insist that renewables couldn’t be scaled
up fast enough and nuclear power was the only alternative.

The shills in question are quite correct, as it happens,
that renewable energy can’t be scaled up fast enough to replace fossil fuels;
they could have said with equal truth that renewable energy can’t be scaled up
far enough to accomplish that daunting task. The little detail they’re evading
is that nuclear power can’t be scaled up far enough or fast enough, either.
What’s more, however great they look on paper or PowerPoint, neither nuclear
power nor grid-scale renewable power are economically viable in the real world.
The evidence for this is as simple as it is conclusive: no nation anywhere on
the planet has managed either one without vast and continuing government
subsidies. Lacking those, neither one makes enough economic sense to be worth
building, because neither one can provide the kind of cheap abundant electrical
power that makes a modern industrial society possible.

Say this in the kind of company that takes global climate change
seriously, of course, and if you aren’t simply shouted down by those
present—and of course this is the most common response—you can expect to hear
someone say, “Well, something has to do it.” Right there you
can see the lethal blindness that pervades nearly all contemporary debates
about the future, because it’s simply not true that something has to do
it.No divine providence nor any law of
nature guarantees that human beings must have access to as much cheap abundant
electricity as they happen to want.

Stated thus baldly, that may seem like common sense, but
that sort of sense is far from common these days, even—or especially—among
those people who think they’re grappling with the hard realities of the future.
Here’s a useful example. One of this blog’s readers—tip of the archdruidical
hat to Antroposcen—made an elegant short film that was shown at a
climate-themed film festival in Paris while the COP-21 meeting was slouching
toward its pointless end. The film is titled A
Message from the Past, and as the title suggests, it portrays an
incident from a future on the far side of global climate change. I encourage my
readers to click through and watch it now; it’s only a few minutes long, and
its point will be perfectly clear to any regular reader of this blog.

The audience at the film festival, though, found it
incomprehensible. The nearest they came to making sense of it was to guess
that, despite the title, it was about a message from our time that had somehow
found its way to the distant past. The thought that the future on the far side
of global climate change might have some resemblance to the preindustrial
past—that people in that future, in the wake of the immense collective catastrophes
our actions are busy creating for them, might wear handmade clothing of
primitive cut and find surviving scraps of our technologies baffling relics of
a bygone time—seems to have been wholly beyond the grasp of their imaginations.

Two factors make this blindness to an entire spectrum of
probable futures astonishing. The first is that not that long ago, plenty of
people in the climate change activism scene were talking openly about the
possibility that uncontrolled climate change could stomp industrial society
with the inevitability of a boot descending on an eggshell. I’m thinking here,
among other examples, of the much-repeated claim by James Lovelock a few years
back that the likely outcome of global climate change, if nothing was done, was
heat so severe that the only human survivors a few centuries from now would be
“a few hundred breeding pairs” huddled around the shores of the Arctic Ocean.

It used to be all the rage in climate change literature to
go on at length about the ghastly future that would be ours if global
temperatures warmed far enough to trigger serious methane releases from
northern permafrost, tip one or more of the planet’s remaining ice sheets into
rapid collapse, and send sea water rising to drown low-lying regions. Lurid scenarios
of civilizational collapse and mass dieoff appeared in book after lavishly
marketed book. Of late, though, that entire theme seems to have dropped out of
the collective imagination of the activist community, to be replaced by
strident claims that everything will be just fine if we ignore the hard lessons
of the last thirty years of attempted renewable-energy buildouts and fling
every available dollar, euro, yuan, etc. into subsidies for an even more
grandiose wave of uneconomical renewable-energy powerplants.

The second factor is even more remarkable, and it’s the
existence of that first factor that makes it so. Those methane releases, rising
seas, and collapsing ice sheets? They’re no longer confined to the pages of
remaindered global warming books. They’re happening in the real world, right
now.

Methane releases? Check out the massive
craters blown out of Siberian permafrost in the last few years by
huge methane burps, or the way the Arctic Ocean fizzes every summer like a
freshly poured soda as underwater methane deposits get destabilized by rising
temperatures. Methane isn’t the world-wrecking ultrapollutant that a certain
class of apocalyptic fantasy likes to imagine, mostly because it doesn’t last
long in the atmosphere—the average lifespan of a methane molecule once it seeps
out of the permafrost is about ten years—but while it’s there, it traps heat
much more effectively than carbon dioxide. The Arctic is already warming far
more drastically than any other region of the planet, and the nice thick
blanket of methane with which it’s wrapped itself is an important part of the
reason why.

Those methane releases make a great example of the sudden stop
that overtook discussions of the harsh future ahead of us, once that future
started to arrive. Before they began to occur, methane releases played a huge
role in climate change literature—Mark Lynas’ colorful and heavily marketed
book Six Degrees is only one of many examples. Once the methane releases
actually got under way, as I noted in a
post here some years ago, most activists abruptly stopped talking about
it, and references to methane on the doomward end of the blogosphere started
fielding dismissive comments by climate-change mavens insisting that methane
doesn’t matter and carbon dioxide is the thing to watch.

Rising seas? You can watch that in action in low-lying
coastal regions anywhere in the world, but for a convenient close-up, pay a
visit to Miami
Beach, Florida. You’ll want to do that quickly, though, while it’s
still there. Sea levels off Florida have been rising about an inch a year, and
southern Florida, Miami Beach included, is built on porous limestone.These days, as a result, whenever an
unusually high tide combines with a strong onshore wind, salt water comes bubbling
up from the storm sewers and seeping right out of the ground, and the streets
of Miami Beach end up hubcap-deep in it. Further inland, seawater
is infiltrating the aquifer from which southern Florida gets drinking
water, and killing plants in low-lying areas near the coast.

The situation in southern Florida gets some press, but I
suspect this is because Florida is a red state and the state government’s
frantic denial that global warming is happening makes an easy target for humor.
The same phenomenon is happening at varying paces elsewhere in the world, as a
combination of thermal expansion of warming seawater, runoff from melting
glaciers, and a grab-bag of local and regional oceanographic phenomena boosts
sea level well above its historic place. Nothing significant is being done
about it—to be fair, it’s unlikely that anything significant can be done about
it at this point, short of a total moratorium on greenhouse gas generation, and
the COP-21 talks made it painfully clear that that’s not going to happen.

Instead, southern Florida faces a fate that’s going to be
all too familiar to many millions of people elsewhere in the world over the
years ahead. As fresh water runs short and farm and orchard crops die from salt
poisoning, mass
migration will be the order of the day. Over the short term, southern
Florida will gradually turn into salt marsh; look further into the future, and
you can see Florida’s ultimate destiny, as a region of shoals, reefs, and
islets extending well out into the Gulf of Mexico, with the corroded ruins of
skyscrapers rising from the sea here and there as a reminder of the fading
past.

Does this sound like science fiction? It’s the inescapable
consequence of changes that are already under way. Even if COP-21 had produced
an agreement that mattered—say, a binding commitment on the part of all the
world’s nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions immediately and lower them to
zero by 2030—southern Florida would still be doomed.The processes that are driving sea levels up
can’t turn on a dime; just as it took more than a century of unrestricted
atmospheric pollution to begin the flooding of southern Florida, it would take
a long time and a great deal of hard work to reverse that, even if the
political will was available. As it is, the agreement signed in Paris simply
means that the flooding will continue unchecked.

A far more dramatic series of events, meanwhile, is getting
under way far north of Florida. Yes, that’s the
breakup of the Greenland ice sheet. During the last few summers, as
unprecedented warmth gripped the Arctic, rivers of meltwater have begun flowing
across Greenland’s glacial surface, plunging into a growing network of chasms
and tunnels that riddle the ice sheet like the holes in Swiss cheese. This is
new; discussions of Greenland’s ice sheet from as little as five years ago
didn’t mention the meltwater rivers at all, much less the hollowing out of the
ice. Equally new is the fact that the vast majority of that meltwater isn’t
flowing into the ocean—scientists have checked that, using every tool at their
disposal up to and including legions of yellow rubber ducks tossed into
meltwater streams.

What all this means is that in the decades immediately ahead
of us, in all likelihood, we’ll get to see a spectacle no human being has seen
since the end of the last ice age: the catastrophic breakup of a major ice
sheet. If you got taught in school, as so many American schoolchildren were,
that the great glacial sheets of the ice age melted at an imperceptible pace,
think again; glaciologists disproved that decades ago. What happens, instead,
is a series of sudden collapses that kick the pace of melting into overdrive at
unpredictable intervals. What paleoclimatologists call global
meltwater pulses—sudden surges of ice and water from collapsing ice
sheets—send sea levels soaring by several meters, drowning large tracts of land
in an impressively short time.

Ice sheet collapses happen in a variety of ways, and
Greenland is very well positioned to enact one of the better documented
processes. The vast weight of all that ice pressing down on the crust through
the millennia has turned the land beneath the ice into a shallow bowl
surrounded by mountains—and that shallow bowl is where all the meltwater is
going. Eventually the water will rise high enough to find an outlet to the sea,
and when it does, it will begin to flow out—and it will take much of the ice
with it.

As that happens, seismographs across the North Atlantic
basin will go crazy as Greenland’s ice sheet, tormented beyond endurance by the
conflict between gravity and buoyancy, begins to break apart. A first great
meltwater surged will vomit anything up to thousands of cubic miles of ice into
the ocean. Huge icebergs will drift east and then south on the currents, and
release more water as they melt. After that, summer after summer, the process
will repeat itself, until some fraction of Greenland’s total ice sheet has been
dumped into the ocean. How large a fraction? That’s impossible to know in
advance, but all other things being equal, the more greenhouse gases get dumped
into the atmosphere, the faster and more complete Greenland’s breakup will be.

The thing to keep in mind here is that the coming global
meltwater pulse will have consequences all over the world. Once it happens—and
again, the processes that will lead to that event are already well under way,
and nothing the world’s industrial nations are willing to do can stop it—it
will simply be a matter of time before the statistically inevitable combination
of high tides and stormwinds sends sea water flooding into New York City’s
subway system and the vast network of underground tunnels that houses much of
the city’s infrastructure. Every other coastal city in the world will wait for
its own number to come up. No doubt we’ll hear plenty of talk about building
vast new flood defenses to keep back the rising waters, but let us please be
real; any such project would require years of lead time and almost unimaginable
amounts of money, and no nation anywhere in the world is showing the least
interest in doing the thing now, when it might still be an option.

There’s a profound irony, in other words, in all the rhetoric
from Paris about balancing concerns about the climate with the supposed need
for perpetual economic growth. Imagine for a moment just how the coming global
meltwater pulse will impact the world economy. Countless trillions of dollars
in coastal infrastructure around the world will become “sunk costs” in more
than a metaphorical sense; millions of people in low-lying areas such as
southern Florida will have to relocate as their homes become uninhabitable, and
trillions of dollars of real estate will have its value drop to zero. A galaxy
of costs for which nobody is planning will have to be met out of government and
business revenue streams that have been hammered by the direct and indirect
effects of worldwide coastal flooding.

What’s more, it won’t be a single event, over and done with
in a few weeks or months or years.Every
year for decades or centuries to come, more ice and meltwater will go sluicing
into the oceans, more coastal cities and regions will face that one seawater
surge too many, more costs will have to be met out of what’s left of a global
economy that’s running out of functioning deepwater ports among many other
things. The result, as I’ve noted in previous
posts here, will be the disintegration of everything that counts as
business as usual, and the opening phases of the bleak new reality that Frank
Landis has sketched out in his harrowing new book Hot Earth Dreams—the best currently available book on what the world will
look like in the wake of severe climate change, and thus inevitably ignored by
everyone in the current environmental mainstream.(You can read the first five chapters of Landis' book here.)

By the time COP-21’s attendees convened in Paris, it was probably
already too late to keep global climate change from spinning completely
out of control. The embarrassingly feeble agreement that came out of
that event, though, has guaranteed that nothing significant will be
done. The hard political and economic realities that made any actual cut
in greenhouse gas emissions all but unthinkable are just layers of
icing on the cake, part of the predicament of our time—a predicament
that defines the words “too little, too late” as our basic approach to
the future looming up ahead of us.